Page 19 - Geri Smith News Today : Breaking News, Live Updates & Top Stories | Vimarsana

Took the girls had been her friend turned roommate turned babysitter. >> she said i'll babysit for you. i'll take care of her while you work. i said, well, that's great because i really thought i was blessed. >> first it was renee she looked after. then renee and pepper and then two years later little brother raymond leonard smith jr. wait. brother? it wasn't just the two girls. there was a younger brother the girls never knew they had. the father wasn't around very much. geri supported them all with what she could make as a waitress. and shirley made a change, a positive one, it seemed, at le...

Did she ever threaten to do that? >> yeah, many times. we'd do something wrong, and she would say, well, you stop doing that or i'm going to send you off to geri's house. >> and so they lived a life of packing up and fleeing state to state, one flop house to the next, searching for the cheapest place to stay and then skip out of. hunger constant. medical care, nonexistent. when money ran out, as it often did, shirley drove to the nearest truck stop. the girls would bed down in the car and watch shirley sneak off to do -- well, they didn't know. and alone and frightened, they held on to each ot...

Where was he now? geri gave us a copy of his birth certificate. he would be about 40 now. and our chances of finding him seemed, frankly, slim. we called 40-year-old ray smiths all over the country. there was ray smith in colorado, ray smith in maryland, in new jersey, in kansas. but did he go by the name ray smith? and then a call back. it was the ray smith from colorado. he had the right name, the right age, place of birth, had had grown up without knowing any blood relatives. all this ray smith knew was his mother's name. according to his birth certificate was jerry. he was starting to soun...

Said. told her about a woman working in the sex trade named geri smith who didn't want her babies. and one day shirley showed up at barbara's house with a 3-month-old baby she called rhonda patricia smith. barbara could see it was a little iffy but she wanted that baby so badly. and so she said she ignored the red flags. >> nope, didn't care. didn't really care. >> she was going to see to it, she said, that rhonda was loved and cared for by the best parents she could ever possibly have. bob and barbara legally adopted their little princess four years later in the fall of 1973. and it was short...

And renee to her office to hear in person the results of the test. >> 99.99% probability. >> that's it. >> yep, that means it's confirmed. >> i can't believe this is actually happening. >> how soon could they meet geri, the sisters wanted to know. and what's she like? how did she know shirley? we arranged a reunion for the next day. geri arrived first and told us how she saw the long lost girls on our program. >> i saw the picture of shirley and went crazy. i was hysterical because i knew who she was. and then when i saw the girls, i knew they were mine. >> after how -- all those years? >> 37 ...